1. Technical Field
The description and claims herein generally relate to date and time conversion, and more specifically relate to real time universal date and time conversion in a computer system.
2. Background Art
Many different date calendaring systems have been developed over the centuries. These date calendaring systems are typically based on a complex set of observations, algorithms, and conventions, which attempt to define a ‘time’ and ‘date’ according to the sun, moon, stars, or other bodies with respect to the earth and each other. The modern business world has largely accepted the Gregorian calendar (as adopted by ISO 8601 or other national/local conventions). However, even with this “standard,” there are still important differences in each implementation of this calendar in business, financial, and civil applications. These differences create confusion and inaccuracies regarding data produced by or extracted from computer applications and computer systems using these date calendaring systems. In addition there are many other formats in use around the world. Thus many seemingly irreconcilable variations of calendaring systems have been promulgated over time, and many different calendaring systems are in use around the world today.
When developing computer programs, programmers must deal with these different calendar systems to share information between computers, applications and data stored with a different date system. In the past, the majority of programmers have attempted to reconcile the different calendaring systems by manual creation of a fixed translation table for each year and each conversion, with each table representing the specific conversion format desired (for instance, Date of Year for 2006 to ISO 8601 Week of Year for 2006). This involves error-prone manual work in the creation and loading of these conversion tables. Other attempts have used post-processing routines, either done manually or run automatically, to refine the extracted data to convert it to a date in the desired format, after the initial data gathering had been done. These prior attempts at date and time conversion are directed to a specific situation and thus limited to that situation and conversion. These prior methods are impractical for handling any long era or group of timeframes or other multiple calendar systems. Thus, there is currently no known way to reliably convert the date and time to a desired format during the runtime of an application or query, without resorting to fixed published conversion tables or the like. There is furthermore no way to change the date format requested, real-time, to accommodate changing or new date format needs as they arise.
Without a way to efficiently and in real time convert dates between different calendar systems, computer system development will continue to suffer from error prone and inefficient conversion of dates using conversion tables.